---
type: claim
domain: internet-finance
description: "Borrowing from computer science priority inheritance, nascent technologies that are prerequisites for high-value future systems inherit the priority and eventually the valuation of those future systems — providing a mechanistic basis for investing in the future"
confidence: experimental
source: "m3ta, Architectural Investing manuscript; priority inheritance protocol in real-time operating systems (Sha, Rajkumar, Lehoczky 1990)"
created: 2026-04-04
---

# Priority inheritance means nascent technologies inherit economic value from the future systems they will enable because dependency chains transmit importance backward through time

In computer science, priority inheritance prevents low-priority tasks holding resources needed by high-priority tasks from blocking progress — the low-priority task temporarily inherits the high priority. Applied to investment: nascent technologies that are prerequisites for high-value future systems inherit the priority (and eventually the valuation) of those future systems.

The copper example makes this concrete: copper was economically marginal in medieval Europe — useful for pots and decoration but not a strategic resource. Faraday's discovery of electromagnetism retroactively made copper essential infrastructure for the entire electrical age. The resource's value was determined by a future knowledge state that didn't exist when the resource was acquired. An investor who understood the dependency chain — electrification requires conductive materials, copper is the best conductor — could have captured the value inheritance before the market priced it in.

The investment implication: identifying which current technologies are prerequisites for which future systems allows you to invest in the inheritance chain before the market prices in the future system. This is not prediction — it's dependency analysis. You don't need to know WHEN the future system arrives, only that it REQUIRES certain prerequisites, and those prerequisites aren't yet valued at their inherited importance.

This provides a mechanistic basis for "investing in the future" that goes beyond conviction or narrative. It's following dependency chains, not making bets. The mechanism is falsifiable: if the future system doesn't materialize, the inheritance doesn't happen. If it does, the prerequisite technologies inherit its valuation.

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Relevant Notes:
- [[value is doubly unstable because both market prices and underlying relevance shift with the knowledge landscape]] — priority inheritance works because value is doubly unstable
- [[products are crystallized imagination that augment human capacity]] — prerequisite technologies embody the knowledge needed to reach the future system
- [[the personbyte is a fundamental quantization limit on knowledge accumulation]] — complex future systems require knowledge networks that prerequisite technologies enable

Topics:
- internet-finance
- teleological-economics
